Read This Book If: You’re Seeing Red

You’ve done it. You’ve suffered through February and its special horrors—Valentine’s Day, dry skin, snowstorms, the media’s adoption of ridiculous made-up words to describe snowstorms, the unfairness of Canada having Kevin Martin, philosopher of ice, as the skip of its curling team—with the result that now, on the first day of March, you find yourself in a threatening mood. I’d like to tell you that the new month will provide respite from your inner turmoil, but I’m afraid not. This is the month when winter lingers past all sense, when Brutus gathers his courage, when madness descends on sports fans, when you think you’ll die if you have to wear your puffy coat one second longer.

When suffering is certain, you must do what humans have always done. You must seek solace in the suffering of those who have been spectacularly martyred for public entertainment: Jesus Christ and Saint Sebastian, for instance, or, if they’re not your style, Tiger Woods, the two most recent governors of New York, or, in a pinch, the hundreds of thousands of bulls who have perished across continents and centuries.

“A History of Bullfighting” is a compact, digestible paperback from Reaktion Books, in which the author, Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier, takes the reader down the blood-soaked streets of Seville in the eighteenth century to the blood-soaked arenas of Latin America in the nineteenth to the blood-soaked manuscripts of Bataille and Hemingway in the twentieth. Along the way, we learn of the many inventive ways in which bulls were (and are) killed. Of note: death by banderilla of fire (a banderilla is a dart with a barbed harpoon; a banderilla of fire is a dart with a barbed harpoon onto which have been affixed firecrackers); death by tail stomp (the bull’s tail is twisted then crushed beneath the matador’s foot to prevent it from getting up); death by condor:

In the Andes … incredibly, on occasion a live condor, its wings held by at least four men, has its talons sewn tightly into the bull’s morillo (the hump of muscle at the base of the bull’s neck) using an awl threaded with string.

If you are uncertain that you can relate to the bull’s suffering, given that you are human and the bull is not, read Hardoin-Fugier’s description of how the bullfight mirrored the public execution. Instantly you see that bullfighting rose from the ashes (in the case of autos-da-fé) of human victims, a psychological construct for coping with guilt, a real construct for externalizing horror—the blood of the bulls washing the blood off society’s hands. Marvel, particularly, at the common language used in talking about the two: the Inquisition, Hardoin-Fugier writes, said that it “relaxed the victim into the secular arm,” so that the state, not the Church, bore responsibility. Similarly, a bull was “relaxed into the arm of the crowd”—its death the fault of everyone and no one.

Since you are unlikely to attend either an execution or a bullfight this month, relaxing your troubled mind into the pages of Hardoin-Fugier’s book is, I think, your best option for violent escapism. It is spectacular in its own right—not just in its descriptions but in its images, culled from bullfighting’s rich visual history. I gazed for a long time at this painting, made in 1992 by the Russian artist Sergei Chepik,

and I felt the gloom begin to lift. Not because the image is cheering, but because it made me glad that I am not a bull; that I am not a human who delights in the killing of bulls; that I am a human who delights in painting and literature. Small consolations, to be sure, but enough, I think, to get me through the next four weeks.